At Development, we are committed to making submission as easy as possible for our authors. We realise that submitting a paper to any journal can be a lengthy process: authors are asked to comply with detailed journal-specific guidelines without knowing whether the paper will be accepted or even peer-reviewed. We are therefore delighted to announce our new format-free submission policy.

Authors can now submit a paper to Development in any format. We will only ask what is absolutely necessary at submission. What this means is that as long as an article adheres to our guidelines on length and the text and figures are easily viewable by reviewers, we only require information that is necessary to confirm the identities of all authors. This does mean that other requirements, such as file formats and sizes, our submission checklist, and provision of funding information, will move to the revision stage – at which point over 95% of papers will be accepted for publication.

As part of this change, and recognising the importance of comprehensive Materials and Methods sections to aid transparency and reproducibility, we are also removing the Materials and Methods section from our length limit to an article. The aim is to allow authors the space they need to describe their methods in sufficient detail for readers to fully understand and replicate the experiments conducted. In exceptional cases where the Materials and Methods are particularly lengthy, more detailed experimental protocols, descriptions of computational analyses or lists of primers and other reagents may still be included as Supplementary Materials and Methods.

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